Donald Taylor, Andrew Wang, and I, with a lot of feedback from Jonah Greenthal, are writing sets that will be used primarily in Illinois. The sets have some quirks, so it is possible that they may only be useful in Illinois, but there are a lot of questions that perhaps somebody can use in some way.

The first group of questions is Scobol Solo. This is tossup only. The questions will be available from October 29 through May 20. There are 398 questions. 60 of them are above regular high school difficulty. At least 120 of them, and probably more, can be used at below regular high school difficulty. The distribution is almost standard--25% science, 20% history, 20% literature, 15% fine arts, and 5% each religion/myth, social science/philosophy, current events, and geography.

If you are using the majority of the questions, then the charge is $10 per team or $3 per person, depending on how you want to run your tournament. If you want to write bonuses to go with the tossups, then I am willing to deal to make it cheaper. The deal would include you having access to the tossups as they are being written so that you can avoid repeats.

The second group of questions is Masonics. This is tossup and bonus--we could put the questions into a standard order so that you would not need to use Masonic rules. There are 336 tossups and 320 bonuses. Half of them are below standard high school difficulty, and half of them are above standard high school difficulty. The distribution is not standard, with the biggest discrepancies being that 48/72 is math (18%); the math bonuses all have one or two computational parts (while all the tossups are noncomputational); there are four grammar tossups; and there are two tossups each in journalism, agriculture, industrial arts, technology, and consumer education. The questions will be available starting in early March. If you are running a tournament just using these questions, the charge is $10 per team. I can negotiate down if you want to combine some of these questions with others.

It is fine to use questions from both sets if that would help you.

The Solo questions are already being used in the Chicagoland Area. There is a good chance that the conference in central Ohio that includes Olentangy Liberty will also use them.

The only way for Illinois teams/students to play the Masonic questions is in the Masonic Tournament.

If you want to use these questions as is, or if you want to use them within a set, let me know.